From one of the most popular and acclaimed story writers of her generation, a single-volume short story from the author of 2017's Do Not Become Alarmed, a beautifully packaged palm-sized gift book. “That the yellow house was thrillingly affordable might have been a warning sign, if Eleanor had known how to read it. But she’d been desperate. She was sharing a room with her four-year-old daughter, Hattie, in her parents’ house, and she had to get out.” From the award-winning novelist and short story writer Maile Meloy, Devotion: A Rat Story is an exquisitely unsettling tale about a young single mother whose new home becomes a kind of nightmare she must resolve on her own. Eleanor is in such a rush to move away from her parents that she allows an imperious realtor to rush her to close on the too-good-to-be-true home without an inspection. Shortly after the house becomes legally hers—with every cent and all of her pride and future tied up in the property—the giant rats show themselves. In the yard, in the kitchen, on her daughter’s bed. A walk around the block reveals a decrepit neighboring house where two elderly sisters are feeding and fostering thousands of unusal “pets.” What has Eleanor done? What action can she possibly take now? In Meloy’s characteristically clean, assured style, she captures the hopes and horrors of domestic life with an element of suspense that drives the reader feverishly to the end.
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Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, the short-story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (named one of the 10 Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review), and a bestselling middle-grade trilogy. Her fiction has won the Paris Review‘s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was shortlisted for the UK’s Orange Prize and has been chosen as one of Granta‘s Best Young American Novelists.
Cassandra Campbell has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and the prestigious Odyssey Award for narration. She was been named a “Best Voice” by AudioFile magazine and in 2018 was inducted in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame.